STUDIO NOTES: LOUDER. Completely and totally mindful that this is Abbott & Costello territory, you ask where you going? And they say LOUDER. You scream the question again and they answer, again, LOUDER. Yeah. Repeat until the crooked hook drags you off stage. But the where in this instance IS Louder. Louder Studios. And on the San Francisco street where it sits, corner lot style, we’re going to meet a Mr. Tim Green who, if he had done nothing BUT, would be aces in our book for Nation of Ulysses, the DC agitprop-fingerprint-filing off rock formalists. Which at this remove has all but been overshadowed by his newest and latest, The Fucking Champs, reigning title-holders for that super-compressed AM radio thing that sounded bitchin’ blaring out of your 1976 Trans Am’s 8-track.

“But we’re not compression freaks,” a mid-session Green notes, sounding for all the world like he’s had to say this well more than once. “I mean we stole Cerwin-Vega’s ‘70s ad campaign that said ‘Loud is beautiful, if it’s a Cerwin-Vega’ and ended up with ‘Loud is beautiful if it’s Louder.’ But what we really are, are ‘60’s mix freaks. You know, where stuff is just jumping out of the mix at you? That comes closest as anything to describing what we like to hear. But we don’t get people in here because they want that ‘Champs’ sound necessarily. I mean that’s not the only thing.”

Probably not. Because through 15 years, seven of them in San Francisco, Green has managed to go bleeding edge through some of the most mightily adventurous production possible in a room like his. To whit, The Melvins’ troika of Maggot, Bootlicker, and Crybaby (Ipecac), as well as their Colossus of Destiny, “a very challenging record,” chuckles Green. “It was like one hour of noise out of which they wanted me to edit out the one section in the middle that sounded remotely songlike. When they played it live…people were trying to fight them.”

Turning back to Turn Me On Deadman, a band that “sounds nothing like The Melvins. OR The Fucking Champs,” Green emphatically, or as emphatically as the laid back Green ever gets, adds, “And here’s something else we DON’T do: we won’t hijack your record.”